Chapter 4. Editing documents

Table of Contents

Working with Unicode
Opening and saving Unicode documents
Opening and closing documents
Creating new documents
<oXygen/> plugin wizards
Creating Documents based on Templates
Saving documents
Opening and Saving Remote Documents via FTP/SFTP
Changing file permissions on a remote FTP server
Opening the current document in a Web browser
Closing documents
Viewing file properties
Editing XML documents
Associate a schema to a document
Setting a schema for the Content Completion
Setting a default schema
Adding a Processing Instruction
Learning document structure
Streamline with Content Completion
Code templates
Content Completion helper panels
The Model panel
The Element Structure panel
The Annotation panel
The Attributes panel
The Elements view
The Entities View
Validating XML documents
Checking XML well-formedness
Validating XML documents against a schema
Marking Validation Errors
Validation Example
Caching the Schema Used for Validation
Validate As You Type
Custom validation of XML documents
Validation Scenario
Validation Actions in the User Interface
Resolving references to remote schemas with an XML Catalog
Document navigation
Folding of the XML elements
Outline View
XML Document Overview
Outliner filters
Modification Follow-up
Document Structure Change
The popup menu of the Outline tree
Document Tag Selection
Grouping documents in XML projects
Large Documents
Creating an included part
Creating a new project
Including document parts with XInclude
Working with XML Catalogs
Formatting and indenting documents (pretty print)
Viewing status information
XML editor specific actions
Edit actions
Select actions
Source actions
XML document actions
XML Refactoring actions
Smart editing
Syntax highlight depending on namespace prefix
Editing DITA Maps
Advanced operations
Inserting a Topic Reference
Inserting a Topic Heading
Inserting a Topic Group
Edit properties
Transforming DITA Maps
Available Output Formats
Configuring a DITA transformation
Customizing the DITA scenario
The Parameters tab
The Filters tab
The Advanced tab
The Output tab
The FO Processor tab
Running a DITA Map ANT transformation
DITA OT customization support
Support for transformation customizations
Using your own DITA OT toolkit from <oXygen/>
Using your custom build file
Customizing the <oXygen/> ANT tool
Upgrading to a new version of DITA OT
Increasing the memory for the ANT process
Resolving topic references through catalog
DITA specializations support
Support for editing DITA Map specializations
Support for editing DITA Topic specializations
Editing CSS stylesheets
Validating CSS stylesheets
Content Completion in CSS stylesheets
CSS Outline View
Folding in CSS stylesheets
Formatting and indenting CSS stylesheets (pretty print)
Other CSS editing actions
Changing the user interface language

Working with Unicode

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Unicode is an internationally recognized standard, adopted by industry leaders. The Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.

It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends. Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets.

As a modern XML Editor, <oXygen/> provides support for the Unicode standard enabling your XML application to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. Internally, the <oXygen/> XML Editor uses 16bit characters covering the Unicode Character set.

Opening and saving Unicode documents

On loading documents <oXygen/> receives the encoding of the document from the Eclipse platform. This is then used to instruct the Java Encoder to load support for and save using the code chart specified.

While in most cases you will use UTF-8, simply changing the encoding name will cause the file to be saved using the new encoding. The appendix Unicode Character Encoding provides a matrix that matches common names with Java Names. It also explains what you should type in the XML prolog to cause the document to be saved as the required encoding.

To edit document written in Japanese or Chinese, you will need to change the font to one that supports the specific characters (a Unicode font). For the Windows platform, use of Arial Unicode MS or MS Gothic is recommended. Do not expect Wordpad or Notepad to handle these encodings. Use Internet Explorer or Word to eventually examine XML documents.

When a document with a UTF-16 encoding is edited and saved in <oXygen/>, the saved document will have a byte order mark (BOM) which will specify the byte order of the document's content. The default byte order is platform dependent. That means that a UTF-16 document created on a Windows platform (where the default byte order mark is UnicodeLittle) will have a different BOM than a UTF-16 document created on a Mac OS platform (where the byte order mark is UnicodeBig). The byte order and the BOM of an existing document will be preserved by <oXygen/> when the document is edited and saved.

Note

The naming convention used under Java does not always correspond to the common names used by the Unicode standard. For instance, while in XML you will use encoding="UTF-8", in Java the same encoding has the name "UTF8".